Passions: A Los Gatos sculptor’s vision of the world

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David Middlebrook works on a bronze sculpture in his Los Gatos workshop. Middlebrook's work and workspace are the subjects of 'In the Artist’s Studio' at NUMU through Oct. 21.(Gary Reyes /Mercury News)

Artist David Middlebrook is photographed with one of his sculptures on display at the Triton Museum in Santa Clara on Oct. 7, 2010. This one is called "Head of Dogon". David Middlebrook is the artist behind all of the new public art at Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga. He has been an artist for the past 40 years. He recently "retired" as an active art professor at San Jose State for the past 36 years. Now he is devoting all of his time to his art projects which for the past 40 years have spanned all over the globe. Middlebrook is 66-years-old and has no intention of slowing down. (Gary Reyes /Mercury News)

After 12 hours a day in his studio, David Middlebrook can’t get to sleep at night unless he works on sculpting in his mind, either on a piece already under way or one of his many ideas for a new one. When he goes on vacation with his wife, Lita, he comes back with his sketchbook filled with concepts for future sculpture projects.

And yet he never feels that he’s working. He thinks of it more as a passion and he’s caught in its grip — passion for his art, his world and the responsibility of using the art to help preserve the world.

“It is equally the job of our artists and engineers to maintain the stewardship of our planet to preserve our children’s inheritance,” he said. “The job of the artist is to keep pressure on those in power to always be aware of the abuses, and the job of the engineer to point out how to make the planet better.”

Middlebrook’s constant need to create things has him in the unusual position of simultaneously having a major show, “The Nature of Things,” at the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara and a show on the grounds of the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga. Seven hundred people crowded into the opening of the Triton show on Oct. 1.

“He’s one of our local art treasures who has an international reputation,” said Preston Metcalf, curator of art at the Triton. “David has some profound ideas about humanity’s impact on the Earth, what we’ve done to our world and what our future may be if we don’t start taking better care of our resources.”

Middlebrook, 66, recently retired as an art professor at San Jose State, after teaching there for 36 years. That’s given him a clear path to pursue his passions, which include his family. The couple lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where Middlebrook has maintained his studio since 1974.

Artists are often known for their egos, but Middlebrook and his wife have never had a problem with that. She’s a real estate broker and “we don’t compete in any way,” Lita Ruble-Middlebrook said.

“He’s just doing what he was meant to do, what his destiny was,” she said. “He was born to be an artist.”

Early signs of that talent appeared when Middlebrook was a boy in Jackson, Mich. When he was 6, he turned a sand box into a city, using paper clips to fashion antennas and playing cards as doors for garages. His mother, Mary, now 90 years old, was thrilled and always managed to get whatever materials he needed after that so he could follow his artistic dreams.

“That’s when my career started,” Middlebrook said. “In grade school, I was the one who was always asked to draw the turkey and the Pilgrims on the blackboard.”

Driven even then, he made Eagle Scout at age 13 and set a record at the time for merit badges earned — 57.

By high school, he led a bit of a double life as an artist and a jock. He worked on art when he could and played on his school’s varsity football and basketball teams. He also was on the track team and won a basketball scholarship to Albion College in Michigan, where he continued his dual interests. He majored in art and was captain of the track team. Today, his workout is an artistic one — in his studio.

After earning his masters of fine arts at the University of Iowa in 1970, Middlebrook became a pioneer in the ceramic art movement in the 1970s and slowly evolved into the sculptor he is today. His work reflects the influence of his travels around the world, including stints as visiting artist at the University of Darwin in Australia and the University of Natal in South Africa. It also celebrates the wonder of the natural world around us.

Middlebrook is proud that his children are carrying on his devotion to art. His oldest son, Jason, is a successful artist in New York; a daughter is an actress who recently wrote and starred in a one-woman play. A stepson is a tenured professor of art at Foothill College. He and his wife brought half a dozen children to the marriage: They each had three from a previous marriage.

He credits a trip to Northern Italy in 1983 with changing his choice of mediums. A master of ceramics, he said he struggled with the instability of the material and found it to be limiting. In a studio in Italy, he discovered stone and today works with a range of stone and bronze in dimensions from 50 pounds to 50 tons, on pieces a few feet high to those soaring 18 feet or more.

“If you can imagine it, you can do it,” Middlebrook said. “My greatest asset is that I can physically see pieces finished in my mind. Then you work backwards. Every step of the way, you have to have a way to engineer it.”

One of the major pieces in the Triton show, “Apparition,” was inspired by a huge log he came across walking in the woods around his house. He could see “the soul of the wood or the soul of the tree” in it. He towed the 500-pound log back to his studio so he could make molds of it.

But for him, it’s all about the next project.

“We all have this unobtainable thing we’re after,” he said. “I guess if we find it, we’re done.”

In reality, “the goal keeps changing and you never get there. You always keep raising the bar higher.”

Contact Linda Goldston at 408-920-5862.

see David Middlebrook’s sculptures

“The Nature of Things” will be on display at the Triton Museum of Art, 1505 Warburton Ave., Santa Clara, through Dec. 5. The museum is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, until 7 p.m. Thursdays. The museum is closed Mondays and holidays. Middlebrook’s pieces displayed on the grounds of the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga will remain for about a year.

What’s your passion?

The Mercury News will periodically profile interesting “passions” and the people behind them. Share your passions at photo@mercurynews.com.